Scientific inquiry is terribly distorted when it's results-driven rather than exploratory. Any work that doesn't seem to have good money-making prospects will be abandoned or, worse yet, never undertaken. Ironically, when we reject science that might help humanity or that just seems to satisfy curiosity, (but which some crystal-ball gazer deems unprofitable), we may also end up not following up on ideas that might well be very profitable. That's because we think we can predict the future, but we can't. As I said in an earlier comment, "we don't know what we don't know".
The obvious rebuttal is that we don't have infinite resources to throw against the unknown and never have. I'll also point out that scientific progress has always had near future application and it remains foolish to ignore that.
Besides all that, do we really want those sharp and capable scientific minds having to spend time marketing themselves and their work? Wouldn't we be better off letting them get on with what they're already good at and passionate about?
Which sharp and capable minds should get the money? For what purpose? You're asking us to make decisions of considerable import without thinking about the decisions.
Most young scientists have already invested twenty years in their education (the best of their youth), uprooted themselves multiple times in the process (this places no strain on your love life whatsoever), accumulated a huge heap of student debt, and their future career prospects hang the balance. So, absolutely, the problem here is pie-eyed intellectuals with not enough skin in the game.
I have to agree with the grandparent. If research is so valuable that you spent 20 years trying to learn how to do, then it's probably valuable enough for you to attempt on your own even without significant funding.
They are, actually. There's not much difference between the supposed forecast and the reported profit. It's something like $40 million different in profit on $2.3 billion in revenue.
Global warming and the elimination of global poverty are mutually exclusive.
That has yet to be shown.
But what can be shown is the remarkable counterproductive nature of current mitigation efforts. Germany and Denmark have greatly increased the price of their electricity without significantly changing their CO2 emissions. We continue to have poorly designed carbon credit markets. We continue to have a variety of white elephant projects to product relatively expensive renewable energy using a variety of dead-end technologies.
There has been a great deal of effort put forth into propaganda such as the research of this story that there is only one course of action, extreme, urgent climate mitigation right now. The problem remains as I noted at the beginning that there's no evidence to support these claims. Exaggerated projections based on exaggerated models is not evidence.
The problem with your plan is that you COULD be alive when the first effects will be felt.
So what? You have yet to show that the "first effects" are going to be serious. In the meantime, status quo means I'll probably live to see half the world achieve developed world status. Elimination of global poverty still looks to me to be a more worthy goal than mitigating climate change and I do believe there is a large trade off between the two.
There is overwhelming evidence that Climate Change is real. The problem isn't the evidence, but your refusal (for whatever reason) to accept it. It's the exact same attitude as anti-vaxxers or anti-evolution people. The evidence is overwhelming, yet instead of accepting that the evidence exists and adjusting their opinions accordingly, they double-down on their pre-conceived notions because of some kind of emotional investment in what they believe.
Given that the GP stated that he accepts that climate change is real, do you have any relevant to say?
However, I agree with your main point. People need to stop fucking like rabbits. I see religion as being a serious factor in this, because most religions *insist* that people fuck like rabbits for "the greater glory of god" or some bullshit. The Catholic Church, for example, consider contraceptives to be Bad(tm).
Religion bashing. Ok.
We're eating this planet alive with our collective greed and self-obsession, and nobody seems to care. I hate to say it, but we *need* another world war to thin down the numbers.
And a pointless diatribe about the imaginary loose morals of humanity which are again irrelevant. A lot of people care, but they also care about other things which are in conflict with reversing climate change, such as doing good by the people alive now.
The real problem with climate change is that it is not the only problem we have. So obsessively focusing on it at the expense of everything else will result not just in making those other problems worse, but also not actually fixing climate change in a positive direction either.
For example, human fertility gets higher when people get poorer. So the many mitigation strategies out there that make people poorer will make future population higher. It's not going to be a win against climate change since you're making the overpopulation problem, which is the basic driver behind climate change, worse.
Blaming this on religion is silly. Most people aren't significantly religious. It's not the driving factor here though in some cases, it can contribute to the problem and sometimes it can help.
My view is to get rid of overpopulation, we need two things in particular: wealthy people and women who have equal rights to men. A lot of other stuff, such as democracy, rule of law, caring about environmental matters, and developed world infrastructure can follow from that.
The exact same sentence on say, Ars, would have been massively upvoted.
No one has been banned from Slashdot because they had the wrong opinion on climate change. I have on Ars Technica. Ars Technica is the real echo chamber.
Further, I guess I'm not alone in getting tired of idiots using the same irrelevant cliched statements. Sure, there are people who still don't believe in climate change, but why always assume the other party such? Give consideration to others and maybe you'll get some in turn.
The problem with nonsense like this is that you completely ignore social dynamics. If I'm going to rob someone, would I rather rob someone who doesn't have a penny to their name or a rich person? If I'm going to scam someone, who's it going to be? You have time, think about it.
Rich people are targets for a fair portion of the general population while poor people aren't. Disengagement is a defensive mechanism against the sociopaths of society, not because somehow being rich is sociopathic.
Even when the US was in Iraq (before they got kicked out, before they were subsequently begged to come back when Iraq was being overrun by Daesh...),
I don't buy that the US was kicked out. That was political cover for Obama who apparently felt it was more important to be able to claim zero presence in Iraq in 2012 than to have a stable situation in Iraq in 2014. Even a token US presence would have acted as deterrent, stabilizing influence (the US is a fairly neutral party in the three way political split, for example), and training cadre.
Renewable doesn't mean that you can pull an infinite amount of wind power from Kansas. It means that you can keep using the resource without using it up. For example, wind is renewable because there's no danger that we can use up all the wind for good. As long as the Sun shines and the Earth has an atmosphere, there will be wind.
What's important is not the source of the measurement (despite what the anti AGW crowd like to claim) but rather the accuracy and repeatability.
So the source of the measurement isn't a strong factor in the accuracy, repeatability, and precision of the measurement? Perhaps we should think about this before making such statements?
Most people don't think these sorts of things happen regularly, but glacial floods [wikipedia.org] have been seen in the earth's history (as long as you believe the earth older than 6000 years).
Those have a completely different mechanism. A glacier blocks off the course of a river and creates a large lake upstream. When overflow melts through or the glacier retreats then you have these glacial floods. They don't come from the glacier itself melting.
So you see the biggest problem is that people live in flood areas, not that the petroleum industry effectively is the most subsidized industry on the planet, and is insulated against the significant costs the use of fossil fuels is producing?
I agree with the grandparent. Most oil subsidies come from countries that produce oil. You're not going to guilt them into changing their ways. The second problem is that a good portion of the oil subsidies subsidize consumption. That means that it's not a subsidy for the industry, which usually takes a loss on the practice.
But people who live in flood zones? We can simply just not pay when their stuff gets wet.
And that is why despite how America is really no different that other societies in having conflicts of interests, Americans end up having to pay more for health care (and many other things).
I must admit to being a bit mystified about why you think there is a connection here between US competitiveness and socialist programs which explicitly short circuit that competitiveness. Is the US also unique for people blaming the system when they intentionally break it?
Is that why Europe was always about a decade ahead of the USA in terms of cell phone tech?
I think it's due to two factors, the usual one of higher population density of Europe and the poorer quality of land lines in large parts of that region encourage adoption of cell phones.
Also, if European cell phone providers are so much better, then they should be able to make inroads in the US market. But the top five are all US providers though two are majority owned by Japanese or German interests.
USA phone bills started increasing drastically some timer after the breakup, when PUCs started allowing local monopolies and mergers in exchange for promises to roll out sorely needed infrastructure upgrades.
Still doesn't fit the narrative of rates quadrupling overnight and it's not a consequence of the AT&T breakup.
If you want to know why your phone service is so bad, don't look at AT&T, look at the corrupt public servants and politicians in your state chambers who took bribes to allow AT&T to regain its monopoly. The USA political system is corrupt from top to bottom and the the problem is FAR worse at state and local levels than federal. Overall you're generally only a couple of steps better than the funnay asian countries you like to poke fun at and only a step further from being like the Philippines (Which is your former colony and its politicians are applying lessons learned under American colonial rule)
So somehow this corruption would be better under an AT&T monopoly? I don't buy it.
You've taken a position on science for entirely political reasons. Childish as fuck.
Pure projection. One of the many anti-scientific games played here is equating carbon dioxide emissions with pollution of the historical sort (more usually done to spin the yarn that the US is the most polluting country on Earth, er, per capita). But you would have to continue to crank out CO2 at current rates for something like a millennium to get similar air quality health consequences to the non-CO2 pollution of current China.
But somehow it's "entirely political" and "childish as fuck" to point out the error in that.
The costs are too high because of greed, which many believe are still good.
Like the people who put $1 into Medicare and expect to get $3 of services out? Or is it only the ebil corporations who can be greedy?
But personally, I don't think it's relevant whether three of your four examples actually did cost too much because of "greed" or some other cause. Someone said that they would cost too much and lo, they did. Maybe when someone says "the costs are too high", they'll be right again because of "greed".
It says a lot about America when the example you agree with - scrubbers- is one that industry fought so hard against and delayed implementing for so very long.
Not at all. Different interests are a fact of every society and culture, and aren't magically unique to the US.
Same excuse was used against smokestack scrubbers, pollution cleanup, healthcare, social security, you name it.
Being right about one (smokestack scrubbers) out of four ain't bad. The obvious rebuttals to your other three (US-centric of course) is that Superfund is a disaster both in terms of cost and abuse of the law which demonstrates that the cost of pollution clean up can indeed be too high. You might have heard that US health care is like 50% higher cost than the runner up. Too high? Youbetcha.
And of course, social security pays more out than it gets. That's a Cost Too High.
I have to wonder when three of your examples really are costs that are too high.
You have lots of rust, contaminated with other stuff. Even primitive smelters were really resource intensive and used LOTS of coal and free oxygen. Hint, what atmosphere mars has doesn't have lots of oxygen and as far as we know, there's no coal. So turning that rust into steel is in itself a non-trivial exercise.
It was a nontrivial exercise in the first place so I'm just not seeing the big deal here. My view is that getting 1000 people to Mars alive is going to be far harder than figuring out how to make stuff and grow food once you get there. It's also worth noting that Mars probably is littered with a vast number of iron-bearing meteorites which aren't oxidized.
Slashdot Mirror
Scientific inquiry is terribly distorted when it's results-driven rather than exploratory. Any work that doesn't seem to have good money-making prospects will be abandoned or, worse yet, never undertaken. Ironically, when we reject science that might help humanity or that just seems to satisfy curiosity, (but which some crystal-ball gazer deems unprofitable), we may also end up not following up on ideas that might well be very profitable. That's because we think we can predict the future, but we can't. As I said in an earlier comment, "we don't know what we don't know".
The obvious rebuttal is that we don't have infinite resources to throw against the unknown and never have. I'll also point out that scientific progress has always had near future application and it remains foolish to ignore that.
Besides all that, do we really want those sharp and capable scientific minds having to spend time marketing themselves and their work? Wouldn't we be better off letting them get on with what they're already good at and passionate about?
Which sharp and capable minds should get the money? For what purpose? You're asking us to make decisions of considerable import without thinking about the decisions.
Most young scientists have already invested twenty years in their education (the best of their youth), uprooted themselves multiple times in the process (this places no strain on your love life whatsoever), accumulated a huge heap of student debt, and their future career prospects hang the balance. So, absolutely, the problem here is pie-eyed intellectuals with not enough skin in the game.
I have to agree with the grandparent. If research is so valuable that you spent 20 years trying to learn how to do, then it's probably valuable enough for you to attempt on your own even without significant funding.
They are, actually. There's not much difference between the supposed forecast and the reported profit. It's something like $40 million different in profit on $2.3 billion in revenue.
Global warming and the elimination of global poverty are mutually exclusive.
That has yet to be shown.
But what can be shown is the remarkable counterproductive nature of current mitigation efforts. Germany and Denmark have greatly increased the price of their electricity without significantly changing their CO2 emissions. We continue to have poorly designed carbon credit markets. We continue to have a variety of white elephant projects to product relatively expensive renewable energy using a variety of dead-end technologies.
There has been a great deal of effort put forth into propaganda such as the research of this story that there is only one course of action, extreme, urgent climate mitigation right now. The problem remains as I noted at the beginning that there's no evidence to support these claims. Exaggerated projections based on exaggerated models is not evidence.
The problem with your plan is that you COULD be alive when the first effects will be felt.
So what? You have yet to show that the "first effects" are going to be serious. In the meantime, status quo means I'll probably live to see half the world achieve developed world status. Elimination of global poverty still looks to me to be a more worthy goal than mitigating climate change and I do believe there is a large trade off between the two.
What's worse is the Fascist media that keeps recording lower temperatures than actually occur.
LOL. There's a reason I go with evidence and not feelings.
There is overwhelming evidence that Climate Change is real. The problem isn't the evidence, but your refusal (for whatever reason) to accept it. It's the exact same attitude as anti-vaxxers or anti-evolution people. The evidence is overwhelming, yet instead of accepting that the evidence exists and adjusting their opinions accordingly, they double-down on their pre-conceived notions because of some kind of emotional investment in what they believe.
Given that the GP stated that he accepts that climate change is real, do you have any relevant to say?
However, I agree with your main point. People need to stop fucking like rabbits. I see religion as being a serious factor in this, because most religions *insist* that people fuck like rabbits for "the greater glory of god" or some bullshit. The Catholic Church, for example, consider contraceptives to be Bad(tm).
Religion bashing. Ok.
We're eating this planet alive with our collective greed and self-obsession, and nobody seems to care. I hate to say it, but we *need* another world war to thin down the numbers.
And a pointless diatribe about the imaginary loose morals of humanity which are again irrelevant. A lot of people care, but they also care about other things which are in conflict with reversing climate change, such as doing good by the people alive now.
The real problem with climate change is that it is not the only problem we have. So obsessively focusing on it at the expense of everything else will result not just in making those other problems worse, but also not actually fixing climate change in a positive direction either.
For example, human fertility gets higher when people get poorer. So the many mitigation strategies out there that make people poorer will make future population higher. It's not going to be a win against climate change since you're making the overpopulation problem, which is the basic driver behind climate change, worse.
Blaming this on religion is silly. Most people aren't significantly religious. It's not the driving factor here though in some cases, it can contribute to the problem and sometimes it can help.
My view is to get rid of overpopulation, we need two things in particular: wealthy people and women who have equal rights to men. A lot of other stuff, such as democracy, rule of law, caring about environmental matters, and developed world infrastructure can follow from that.
The exact same sentence on say, Ars, would have been massively upvoted.
No one has been banned from Slashdot because they had the wrong opinion on climate change. I have on Ars Technica. Ars Technica is the real echo chamber.
Further, I guess I'm not alone in getting tired of idiots using the same irrelevant cliched statements. Sure, there are people who still don't believe in climate change, but why always assume the other party such? Give consideration to others and maybe you'll get some in turn.
"If you pick up a starving dog and make him prosperous he will not bite you. This is the principal difference between a dog and man."
Sociopaths gonna sociopath.
The problem with nonsense like this is that you completely ignore social dynamics. If I'm going to rob someone, would I rather rob someone who doesn't have a penny to their name or a rich person? If I'm going to scam someone, who's it going to be? You have time, think about it.
Rich people are targets for a fair portion of the general population while poor people aren't. Disengagement is a defensive mechanism against the sociopaths of society, not because somehow being rich is sociopathic.
To not forecast the profit very accurately, is a sign that the business is not in control.
What makes you think they didn't forecast the profit accurately? Public guidance is not forecasting and it is traditional to guide low.
Even when the US was in Iraq (before they got kicked out, before they were subsequently begged to come back when Iraq was being overrun by Daesh...),
I don't buy that the US was kicked out. That was political cover for Obama who apparently felt it was more important to be able to claim zero presence in Iraq in 2012 than to have a stable situation in Iraq in 2014. Even a token US presence would have acted as deterrent, stabilizing influence (the US is a fairly neutral party in the three way political split, for example), and training cadre.
Wind may appear renewable
Renewable doesn't mean that you can pull an infinite amount of wind power from Kansas. It means that you can keep using the resource without using it up. For example, wind is renewable because there's no danger that we can use up all the wind for good. As long as the Sun shines and the Earth has an atmosphere, there will be wind.
What's important is not the source of the measurement (despite what the anti AGW crowd like to claim) but rather the accuracy and repeatability.
So the source of the measurement isn't a strong factor in the accuracy, repeatability, and precision of the measurement? Perhaps we should think about this before making such statements?
Most people don't think these sorts of things happen regularly, but glacial floods [wikipedia.org] have been seen in the earth's history (as long as you believe the earth older than 6000 years).
Those have a completely different mechanism. A glacier blocks off the course of a river and creates a large lake upstream. When overflow melts through or the glacier retreats then you have these glacial floods. They don't come from the glacier itself melting.
So you see the biggest problem is that people live in flood areas, not that the petroleum industry effectively is the most subsidized industry on the planet, and is insulated against the significant costs the use of fossil fuels is producing?
I agree with the grandparent. Most oil subsidies come from countries that produce oil. You're not going to guilt them into changing their ways. The second problem is that a good portion of the oil subsidies subsidize consumption. That means that it's not a subsidy for the industry, which usually takes a loss on the practice.
But people who live in flood zones? We can simply just not pay when their stuff gets wet.
And that is why despite how America is really no different that other societies in having conflicts of interests, Americans end up having to pay more for health care (and many other things).
I must admit to being a bit mystified about why you think there is a connection here between US competitiveness and socialist programs which explicitly short circuit that competitiveness. Is the US also unique for people blaming the system when they intentionally break it?
Is that why Europe was always about a decade ahead of the USA in terms of cell phone tech?
I think it's due to two factors, the usual one of higher population density of Europe and the poorer quality of land lines in large parts of that region encourage adoption of cell phones.
Also, if European cell phone providers are so much better, then they should be able to make inroads in the US market. But the top five are all US providers though two are majority owned by Japanese or German interests.
USA phone bills started increasing drastically some timer after the breakup, when PUCs started allowing local monopolies and mergers in exchange for promises to roll out sorely needed infrastructure upgrades.
Still doesn't fit the narrative of rates quadrupling overnight and it's not a consequence of the AT&T breakup.
If you want to know why your phone service is so bad, don't look at AT&T, look at the corrupt public servants and politicians in your state chambers who took bribes to allow AT&T to regain its monopoly. The USA political system is corrupt from top to bottom and the the problem is FAR worse at state and local levels than federal. Overall you're generally only a couple of steps better than the funnay asian countries you like to poke fun at and only a step further from being like the Philippines (Which is your former colony and its politicians are applying lessons learned under American colonial rule)
So somehow this corruption would be better under an AT&T monopoly? I don't buy it.
You've taken a position on science for entirely political reasons. Childish as fuck.
Pure projection. One of the many anti-scientific games played here is equating carbon dioxide emissions with pollution of the historical sort (more usually done to spin the yarn that the US is the most polluting country on Earth, er, per capita). But you would have to continue to crank out CO2 at current rates for something like a millennium to get similar air quality health consequences to the non-CO2 pollution of current China.
But somehow it's "entirely political" and "childish as fuck" to point out the error in that.
The costs are too high because of greed, which many believe are still good.
Like the people who put $1 into Medicare and expect to get $3 of services out? Or is it only the ebil corporations who can be greedy?
But personally, I don't think it's relevant whether three of your four examples actually did cost too much because of "greed" or some other cause. Someone said that they would cost too much and lo, they did. Maybe when someone says "the costs are too high", they'll be right again because of "greed".
It says a lot about America when the example you agree with - scrubbers- is one that industry fought so hard against and delayed implementing for so very long.
Not at all. Different interests are a fact of every society and culture, and aren't magically unique to the US.
Same excuse was used against smokestack scrubbers, pollution cleanup, healthcare, social security, you name it.
Being right about one (smokestack scrubbers) out of four ain't bad. The obvious rebuttals to your other three (US-centric of course) is that Superfund is a disaster both in terms of cost and abuse of the law which demonstrates that the cost of pollution clean up can indeed be too high. You might have heard that US health care is like 50% higher cost than the runner up. Too high? Youbetcha.
And of course, social security pays more out than it gets. That's a Cost Too High.
I have to wonder when three of your examples really are costs that are too high.
You have lots of rust, contaminated with other stuff. Even primitive smelters were really resource intensive and used LOTS of coal and free oxygen. Hint, what atmosphere mars has doesn't have lots of oxygen and as far as we know, there's no coal. So turning that rust into steel is in itself a non-trivial exercise.
It was a nontrivial exercise in the first place so I'm just not seeing the big deal here. My view is that getting 1000 people to Mars alive is going to be far harder than figuring out how to make stuff and grow food once you get there. It's also worth noting that Mars probably is littered with a vast number of iron-bearing meteorites which aren't oxidized.
So the only reason to go to Mars would be tourism? That's not a compelling case.
As always, it depends on the cost. Cheap enough and tourism will be compelling enough just on its own.
You will not have steaks and meat
Shrimp and fish are a lot easier to transport than cattle.